Daily Archives: May 18, 2016

As Baylor University’s board of regents reviews a law firm’s findings about the school’s response to sexual violence allegations — many involving its football players — Outside the Lines has obtained documents that detail largely unknown allegations of sexual assault, domestic violence and other acts of violence involving several Baylor football players.

According to the police documents, at least some Baylor officials, including coaches, knew about many of the incidents, and most players did not miss playing time for disciplinary reasons. None of the incidents has been widely reported in the media.

In one case from 2011, an assault at an off-campus event in Waco ended with three football players being charged as well as Baylor and Waco police discussing the incident. Waco police, according to documents, took extraordinary steps to keep it from the public view “given the potential high-profile nature of the incident.” According to a police report obtained by Outside the Lines, Waco’s investigating officer asked a commander that “the case be pulled from the computer system so that only persons who had a reason to inquire about the report would be able to access it.” The report was placed in a locked office. [Emphasis added.]

Those guys make the Tallahassee police look like the Gestapo by comparison. Unbelievable.

There’s more, all of it nauseating. Like this:

In one of the recently discovered cases, an alleged victim who was a Baylor student told Outside the Lines that she notified football team chaplain Wes Yeary about what she had reported to Waco police in April 2014: that her boyfriend, a Bears football player, had physically assaulted her on two occasions. The woman said Baylor football coach Art Briles and university President Ken Starr also were told of her allegations. The woman told Outside the Lines that neither Briles nor the university disciplined her ex-boyfriend.

The woman told Outside the Lines she didn’t press criminal charges against him because she was about to graduate and didn’t think the school would punish him. She said investigators from Pepper Hamilton have not contacted her. [Emphasis added.]

Yeah, you can bet that’s a report that’s gonna open some eyes.

At this point, where’s the outrage from Mark Emmert? How is this any worse than the institutional enabling of the football program at Penn State that sent him over the deep end?

ABC and ESPN each will feature Week 1 tripleheaders involving ranked teams as the 2016 college football season gets underway on Labor Day Weekend:

Date

Game (site)

Time (ET)

Network

Sept. 1

South Carolina at Vanderbilt

8 p.m.

ESPN

Sept. 3

Ga. Tech vs. Boston College (Dublin)

7:30 a.m.

ESPN2

Sept. 3

Oklahoma at Houston

Noon

ABC

Sept. 3

Hawaii at Michigan

Noon

ESPN

Sept. 3

LSU vs. Wisconsin (Green Bay, Wis.)

3:30 p.m.

ABC

Sept. 3

Georgia vs. North Carolina (Atlanta)

5:30 p.m.

ESPN

Sept. 3

USC vs. Alabama (Arlington, Texas)

8 p.m.

ABC

Sept. 3

Clemson at Auburn

9 p.m.

ESPN

Sept. 4

Notre Dame at Texas

7:30 p.m.

ABC

Sept. 5

Ole Miss vs. Florida State (Orlando)

8 p.m.

ESPN

My ass obviously isn’t going very far that weekend. And yours?

Next, here’sCFN’s look at its top ten SEC conference games in 2016. Georgia makes the list twice.

8. Tennessee at Georgia, Oct. 1

Depending on what Florida is able to do, this could be for the East title. Tennessee will be coming off the home game against Florida, but it has to go on the road for three games in the next four dates. The Bulldogs will be more than happy to be home in an oasis on a run of three road games in four weeks, coming off away dates at Missouri and Ole Miss.

6. Florida vs. Georgia (in Jax), Oct. 29

Welcome to the a.k.a. Cocktail Party, Kirby Smart. By this point, the Bulldogs will have played on the road at Missouri, Ole Miss and South Carolina, and will have faced Tennessee, but this is the one a Georgia coach has to win. The Gators have to go to Tennessee and host LSU, but the rest of the slate is relatively light until this point. Win this, and Florida might be the lead dog for the East.

Wedged in between those two is the meteor game in Knoxville. From here, it’s hard to see how those three games won’t decide the East.

Last is a look at the hardest and softest SEC home and road schedules. Georgia doesn’t qualify for any of the four spots, although it does get some brief consideration for having an easier road schedule. The interesting schedule there is Arkansas’, which manages to have both the toughest at home and the softest on the road.

Maybe it’s just me, but as far as creative financing goes, this sounds like it’s got Georgia Tech written all over it:

For years, sports teams have tried to defray the multimillion-dollar costs of their new stadiums by asking fans to pay thousands for personal seat licenses that entitle them to buy season tickets.

Flávio Augusto da Silva is taking the concept further. In what may be the first deal of its kind, Mr. da Silva, the majority owner of Orlando City of Major League Soccer, is asking investors from Brazil, China and elsewhere to pay $500,000 each for a stake in the stadium he is building near downtown Orlando. In return, the foreign investors receive annual dividends, two season tickets and something even more valuable: a green card that allows them, their spouses and sometimes even their children to live and work in the United States.

The visa offer is legal, and it uses a 25-year-old federal program, known as EB-5, that is under renewed scrutiny in Congress. Created in 1990, the program was intended to help pay for infrastructure projects in rural areas and poor urban neighborhoods. After bank lending dried up in the last recession, developers turned to the program to finance hotels, condominiums and other projects from Manhattan to Miami. As a result, the number of EB-5 visas awarded grew to almost 9,000 last year, from fewer than 100 in 2003.

Green cards, infrastructure projects and poor urban neighborhoods? That pretty much checks every box Tech could point to for money to spruce up Bobby Dodd Stadium. Now, if they could only figure out a way for coaching salaries to qualify as infrastructure projects…

Thought this was interesting, in part because of one of the specific plaintiffs:

Former college football players at Penn State, Auburn, Georgia, Oregon, Utah and Vanderbilt are suing the NCAA, their former conference and — in some instances — their former school over how their concussions were treated.

Six class-action lawsuits filed Tuesday represent the start of the next wave of concussion litigation in college sports, even as the NCAA finalizes a $75 million settlement from a different lawsuit related to concussions. Chicago attorney Jay Edelson, who is leading this latest effort to sue the NCAA, said 40 to 50 class-action lawsuits will eventually get filed on behalf of tens of thousands of ex-football players.

If it isn’t clear, Georgia isn’t being sued here, but it is being targeted by one former player.

* Georgia — Ronald Hermann (walk-on defensive end, 1984-86) is suing the NCAA and SEC in the Northern District of California. The suit claims Hermann suffered “numerous concussions” and it briefly described an incident in which he “saw stars” after a hit on a kickoff. Today, Hermann’s loss of memory “is particularly challenging, and he has sought out medical treatment in an effort to find answers that Defendants failed to provide,” according to the suit.

There is a downside to being cannon fodder for several years. I’ll be curious to see the specific allegations and what, if any, news about the program in the latter stages of Dooley’s coaching career emerges from this.